Configurable web pages are well known. Many web portals, such as Google® and Yahoo® for example, offer users the ability to customize a start or home page in addition to offering search engine capability. In the case of Google®, users can select and arrange so-called “gadgets” which add certain features to their pages. Each page is personal to the user, however, and cannot be accessed by anyone else.
Also known are online tools that are often hosted by domain registrars for generating websites. Typically these tools use templates and themes to generate boilerplate HTML by plugging user data and text into the template. Other tools such as Google® Sites are a bit more sophisticated and offer user selected functions, for example Google® “gadgets,” that can be plugged into template layouts to generate web pages. Google® Sites also permit user control at the site and page level such that pages can be published, or available only with the direct link, or private and require login to a permitted Google® account. There is no way to control access on a functional basis, for example to control access for each added “gadget”. Disadvantageously, therefore, a Google® Site can not include multiple gadgets on the same page with different access control limits to each “gadget”.
Social networking sites such as Facebook®, Twitter® and the like are also known and provide some ability to configure web served content. However access is only controllable on the site, not the functional, level and as with Google® Sites, access requires permitted users to login to a closed network. One has to have a Facebook® account to see a nonpublic Facebook® page and a Google® account to see a protected Google® site.
The social networking sites are generally organized as isolated silos on the Internet. For example, Facebook® does not want to make it easy for users to use Twitter®. Most social networking sites do provide APIs permitting users to mine their own data, and these APIs are used by social media aggregation sites such as Hootsuite® to present users their own data from different sites. The aggregators typically combine multiple streams of data into columns on a single screen presenting a dashboard view of a user's own information. These aggregation sites are not designed or intended to present users' data to third parties.
One service that is intended to present information to third parties about how to access a user's social media is About.me™. Users set up a page that includes links to their various social media sites, but there is no way to control access to individual accounts on a user-by-user basis and there also is no way for the users to manage their own social media accounts from the same page, much less post updates or additional information about themselves.
Blogging sites, such as Tumblr and the like, are also known. These sites allow users to set up their own pages for publication of a variety of types of data, e.g., images, text, links etc., but there is no way to control access to each of type of data on a single site. Blogging sites are typically public, but some offer the ability host private blogs as well; however, access is controlled on the site level only and most of the content is locally hosted.
There is no simple way to collect data feeds from a variety of social networking sites and combine it with other user data for presentation on a single webpage with access control limited by individual function on the page as opposed to all functions on the page or site.
What is desired, therefore, is web-based system for publishing a website with features and access configured on a user-by-user basis by the website owner to present personal data as well as social network feeds in a single interface. It is also desired that the website owner can update and manage his social media from the same page, as well as organize private data if desired.